I Wish I Never Built a Personal Brand

I had to figure out how to generate customers.

I generated no new business from the event. 🙁

Now when I say I started to build a brand, it wasn’t anything like it is right now and my goal wasn’t to build a brand… I just wanted to close new deals.

But by January 24, 2013, my personal brand started to take off. That was when I started to publish in-depth marketing guides that were 20,000 to 30,000 words.

There was nothing wrong with that, but I wanted a personal blog as well. Somewhere I could write whatever I wanted and not worry about the “business” aspect.

My personal brand has grown for a few reasons:

I blog consistently –

I have a daily podcast

I produce weekly video content

I still kind of speak at conferences

I guest posted weekly

I expanded internationally

I keep giving back

In other words, I’ve built a decent personal brand by just being consistent and putting in long hours for over 16 years.

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It’s not huge, but it’s grown to a decent enough size where it’s larger than any of my corporate brands.

And what’s sad is when the face of a personal brand passes away, in most cases so does the income.

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Now my company is named after me. I’m not the only person within the company… the team is what makes the company amazing, not me. If I wasn’t here tomorrow, the company would still be around, but it probably wouldn’t do as well.

If I changed the name of the company it also probably wouldn’t do as well because my personal brand is influential within the digital marketing world.

And here’s the kicker: It’s also harder to sell a company when it is named after a person.

if you are one of the lucky people who are able to sell a business based off of a personal brand, the multiple won’t be as great because the buyer knows that when the personal brand leaves, so will some of the revenue.

If you want to build a lifestyle business then consider building a personal brand. It’s easier to build, and you can make good money from speaking, consulting, or partnerships.

But if you want to build something big, something that will continually live and move on without you, then focus on building a corporate brand.

Now in an ideal world, what you want to do is leverage personal brands to grow your corporate brand.

It’s a smart model because this made it so the company isn’t reliant on one brand,